Whether you’re a contact centre director, customer services manager, or telephone agent, software as a service (SaaS) solutions can have a material impact on efficiency for any team. Rather than relying on ‘work-arounds’ or bending an existing service to try and fit a solution, SaaS platforms are often cost-effective, if not free of charge (with certain limitations). Here’s a list of 10 really helpful SaaS platforms that could save your contact centre operation time and money.
1. Slack
This multi-platform messaging application is perfect for any size of team. More direct than internal email, Slack is secure and transparent. Featuring direct messaging, video or voice calling, drag and drop file sharing, and channel segregation, Slack has scalable functionality to aid any type of user. You can also use Slack to integrate with other applications like Google Drive, or Dropbox to enhance this already feature-rich application. Very smart!
2. Asana
Asana is a team orientated project management tool with a whole host of great features. Unlike more traditional project management, Asana is heavily reliant on visuals that give ‘at a glance’ overviews of workflows and progress. Breathe new life into your contact centre and customer experience projects with Asana and see how it betters your team performance.
3. Survey Monkey
If you’ve heard of Survey Monkey in the past, it probably strikes you that it’s not an obvious entrant into our top 10. However, Survey Monkey is still one of the best free online survey tools available. As we discussed in our blog, ‘5 free ways to motivate your contact centre agents and teams’, using surveys can be an excellent method for gathering feedback from your teams. Why pay for a survey tool, when you can use a great free service like Survey Monkey to help gather and collate feedback.
4. MailChimp
No, we haven’t gone bananas over ape related SaaS tools. It just happens that MailChimp is another great free (with limitations) platform. An email service provider that is accessible from most mainstream devices, we like the use of MailChimp to send interesting and exciting internal newsletters or emails throughout contact centre operations. The simple to use what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor, means that you don’t have to be an HTML or creative design professional to craft some pretty funky branded emails for your teams.
5. Cisco Webex
Video conferencing is nothing new, and certainly not in the customer contact realm. However, we think you’ll love the intuitive webinar and event functionality that Webex offers. The Cisco born application lives in the cloud and gives users a myriad of options to weave in interactivity into conferences or webinars with consummate ease. It’s a little pricey, especially for SME operations, so scrutinise your number of users and cloud storage to keep costs down.
6. Crash Plan
Nobody expects their IT infrastructure to fail, but invariably things don’t always go quite so smoothly. For a contact centre operation, loss of sensitive data, infiltration, or service down time can be disastrous. Crash Plan is the only data backup and storage platform that gives you truly unlimited online backup space. With no storage size limitations, bandwidth caps or file-type restrictions, Crash Plan is secure and robust.
7. Prezi
There’s nothing more arduous than sitting through an afternoon of contact centre statistics, presented on Microsoft Powerpoint. Liven up your internal (and external) presentations by giving Prezi a go. It’s a simple drag and drop editor and it’s got some great templates straight out-of-the-box. Another free to use application (with limitations), Prezi might help speed things up on a Friday afternoon and keep morale high amongst the team.
8. Dashlane
It seems like everything requires a password these days, even all these new SaaS platforms that you’re going to look at investing in! Dashlane is another free (with limitations) tool that safely and securely stores your passwords in the cloud. You can access them anywhere from any device and it allows you to enhance your own security by generating very different passwords for different accounts.
9. rocketseed
Rocketseed can help. Rocketseed is a centrally controlled consistent email signature platform, instantly applying your chosen signatures at the click of a button. You can retain the granular control between departments or pervasively roll out styles across your operation. We really like the idea of linking to important customer materials on your site, like video FAQs or ‘How to Videos’ to empower your agents and your customers.
10. wetransfer
Although WeTransfer isn’t strictly a SaaS platform, it’s just too helpful to leave off this list. Users transferred more than one billion files throughout 2016, and the brand is looking to expand this year, having just raising $25m of funding. It’s the simplicity that makes WeTransfer a winner. Simply drag-and-drop to transfer large files from A to B. It’s free to use, unless your files truly are gargantuan, and it couldn’t be easier.
For more tips on increasing efficiency and reducing costs in your contact centre operation, you can click the link below to download our free e-book.
